Close encounter and lucky escape
One spring evening in 2004, director and screenwriter James Toback sat in my section at a French restaurant in New York City. I was a 23-year-old waitress.
‘‘Actress, singer or dancer?’’ he asked me.
‘‘Writer,’’ I said.
If you’ve read the recent stories in which dozens of women allege Toback sexually harassed them after promising to help them break into the entertainment industry, then you can guess how the rest of our conversation went. He gave me his number.
At the end of my shift, I raced home to tell my roommate what had happened. We’d arrived from Texas the previous autumn on a Greyhound bus. It had been a rough six months. We were sharing a fifth-floor walk-up studio that had more leaks when it rained than we had pots and pans. We could barely afford the rent. I’d just graduated with an English degree and had no idea how to start a writing career.
So I felt lucky when this man, who had been nominated for an Oscar for screenwriting, said he could tell I had something special and wanted to help. My roommate and I rented his movie
Black and White, as he’d told me to do. One of the first scenes depicted a graphic menage a trois in Central Park. That’s when I noticed the weird bowling-ball sensation in the pit of my stomach – a feeling with which I’d only recently become acquainted.
You see, two months earlier, a wealthy painter who’d also sat in my section at the restaurant had asked me to pose for him at his home in the Hamptons. He promised he wasn’t a creep. He invited me to a prestigious gallery for a reception celebrating his work, introducing me to his wife and his high-class friends as his ‘‘new muse’’. So I agreed to pose but made my boundaries very clear. I thought that would protect me.
It didn’t. He was a creep. Thirteen years later I’m still ashamed of what happened, and how easily I was talked out of boundaries.
So, with that new knowledge that, yes, men five decades my senior would actually try to have sex with me, I balked on calling Toback.
I regretted it for years.
I cursed myself for not having the guts to call, instead of praising my gut for telling me not to. Shouldn’t I have at least heard what he had to say? Shouldn’t I be willing to do anything to achieve my dream?
It’s this impossible choice that men like Toback are betting on. They know you believe they are the gatekeepers to a rewarding career. This can happen in any industry, but it’s particularly acute in creative industries, which lack a formalised career path like law or medicine, and are awash with stories of being ‘‘plucked from obscurity’’ after a chance encounter with a powerful gatekeeper.
Rosario Dawson was a teenager sitting on a stoop in New York when the director of Kids walked by. Ellen Pompeo was a bartender in Manhattan when a casting agent spotted her. According to the New York Daily News, she filmed her first commercial the next day. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by a dozen publishers before she got a call from Bloomsbury.
But what if, instead of good-guy Barry Cunningham, Rowling had been contacted by the co-founder of Weinstein Books? What would she, or should she, have done? If she had said no, would the world ever have heard her voice?
Now, I’m not nearly as talented as Rowling. But these last few weeks, hearing account after account from women pressured into trading access to their bodies for access to success, I wonder what creative geniuses the world has missed out on. What performances, what screenplays, what novels were never written by talented women who gave up on their creative careers after chance encounters with the wrong gatekeepers?
I left New York a few years after Toback came to my table, still broke, much more dejected and with a drinking problem for good measure. I gave up on ‘‘the dream’’ and moved back to Texas. It’s a common tale, I know – my eyes are rolling, too. And, to be clear, I don’t blame it all on the screenwriter, or the painter. I don’t know if I could have ‘‘made it’’ back then even if I’d met the right gatekeeper.
Until the Times published its story, I was still unsure about Toback’s true intentions when he gave me his number. But I stopped regretting not calling him in my early 30s, when I was years sober and had started writing again.
What I found out then, what I wish I had known at 23, is that there’s a slow route to the writing life, too, where the access to and asymmetry of power isn’t so steep. I got my first paid writing gig through a woman I used to waitress with at that French restaurant. Since then, my slow route has been paved with gradstudent debt, internships, endless email pitches and deep friendships.
I didn’t need a Toback. The whole concept of needing a ‘‘big break’’ is a lie. We all get hundreds of small opportunities that can build into something great. And we don’t have to submit ourselves to dangerous men to find them.